Friday, April 15, 2016

Log Horizon II: Knights of Camelot by Mamare Touno

Log Horizon II: Knights of
Camelot

by Mamare Touno

Once again I venture into
the lands of Japanese light novels! Some of you may remember me
being a bit... Singed from No Game No Life (read the review, not the
book) so I kinda decided to stick to safe ground and return to Log
Horizon. I'm really glad I did though. Because here is where I
found a great example of how to write an actually intelligent
character. Something which is frankly hard to do I'll admit but I
have through mostly accident found the first rule, if you want to
write a convincing intelligent character your first best step? Don't
write everyone else as an idiot. Mr. Touno has managed to do this
quite well.

Let me recap, Log Horizon
is the story about a group of people several thousand strong who were
playing a massively popular MMO game called Elder Tales when a new
expansion was released. The players find themselves trapped in a
fantasy world inhabiting bodies that appear to be much like their
characters in the game. However the world doesn't map exactly to the
game, for example the NPCs behave like real people not video game
characters. On the other hand the menu creation system (making
items via menus) continues to function, as does the in-game voice
chat and so on. Another depressing fact is that food (all of it made
via menus) has no taste. Shiroe our main character accepted a job to
save a low level player from a Guild in another city that turned into
bandits and thugs. He was able to rescue her with the help of an old
friend Nyanta. Nyanta is an older gentleman who plays a damage
orientated class called Swashbuckler. Nyanta in this book kinda
comes across as the guy I would like to be someday. He's patient,
kindly, wise unfailing in his support to his friends and able to open
up an entire barrel factory worth of kick ass when needed. Nyanta
has also discovered something very, very important. How to make food
with actual, factual taste and flavor. After months of eating food
that tastes of soggy crackers... Well let's say he's a popular fellow
and he's earned it.

Shiroe and his crew return
to Akiba, the main player city and find that it is swiftly sliding to
seed. The big guilds are seizing territory for monster hunting so
they can gain resources and power. The small guilds are squabbling
among themselves with an attempt to unite having fallen apart under
the weight of that disunity. Additionally because there are no laws,
while the players are physically safe within the city due to the no
combat rule... People just don't work together. Worse some of the
shadier guilds have turned predator and recruit the newbies (many of
them children or younger teens) to use as slave labor, forcing them
to work in sweat shop condition to produce items for sale, or to hunt
monsters barely in their level to farm resources. While everyone
agrees it's a shit thing to do.... Well there are no laws and no cops
so what can you do? The atmosphere has become a grey cloak of
despair and apathy as most of the players have let themselves drift
into a tired old dream of minimum effort just to get by. I'm going
to be honest this part hit me, because I've been there. When you're
tired and worn out and nothing you do seems to matter. Those days
when it seems all you can do is throw all your effort into treading
water and you're just to exhausted to even be angry or upset about
it... I'm honestly lucky that I am to stubborn, pig headed and maybe
just to damn stupid to give up. It also helps that I have good
friends. Speaking of friends Shiroe decides that entire city of
Akiba needs him to be that friend and shake it out of it's
depression.

The plight of the newbies
is brought home to us by the introduction of two other characters.
The twins Minori and Tohya, both of them in middle school, who
randomly met Shiroe in the game before the change. Shiroe had acted
like a mentor to the kids showing them the ropes of playing the game
but when the change happened and everything became real... He got
distracted and didn't contact him. Neither could the twins bring
themselves to contact him and instead fell prey to one of those shady
guilds and became slaves in all but name. Mr. Touno does a good job
of conveying the despair and bleakness of people who feel trapped
with no escape and you might be thinking that this book is a dark,
sad experience but you would be mistaken. Because this is the book
where Shiroe embraces the idea of civil responsibility and decides
he's going to stop fucking around. He's going to pitch in and help
build an actual society. Not just any society, but the kind of
society he can be proud of. Not just because he can't stand how
things are shaking out, not just because people need help, but
because he deserves an awesome society and so do his friends. How is
he going to do this? By selling food with actual taste.

I'm sure you're scratching
your head at that but I'm not going to give away the plan. I'm going
to say that Mr. Touno surrounds Shiroe with smart capable people who
pitch in with him to carry out an audacious plan that combines out of
the box thinking, political and business shenanigans and buckets of
balls to free the newbies of Akiba. Ensure that it can never happen
again. Reinvigorate the economy and society of the city and get
everyone to buy into the idea of government and law. This book
becomes a love letter to civil society and Keynesian economics
without becoming boring or dry and I LOVE IT for being so. I also
love it because Shiroe could easily become a Mary Sue (that is a
character who is perfect in every way and every other character
exists to show and more often tell us how the Mary Sue is perfect in
every way) but instead he's allowed to have faults. To make mistakes
and admit them, which allows him to grow. Additionally and this
helps a lot if you want to avoid having a Mary Sue... People are
allowed to be just as awesome in their own ways as Shiroe. While his
plan was amazing, it simply wouldn't have worked without the help of
other characters and their own skills and talents that Shiroe lacked.
In the end his greatest strength in this book was his ability to get
other people to buy in and help him by making his plan a winning one
for everyone involved. Well... Everyone involved who wasn't a child
enslaving fuckhead but to hell with those guys anyways.

I highly recommend the Log
Horizon series to anyone who has interest in Japanese light novels or
likes planetary romances. I really enjoyed reading this book and it
also gave a bit of a 101 down low on how Keynesian economics works
(if no one is buying anything, then the economy goes splat!). That
said, there's not a lot of action in this book til the end and that's
over pretty quickly. Which means in some ways the book is kinda a
prelude to the action to come. I am giving Log Horizon II: Knight of
Camelot by Mamare Touno a B+.

Next week, we return to the
American Revolution but we take a look at things from the English
side! Stay frosty friends.